Why didn’t we have more video? The short answer is budget and time: making good-quality videos is expensive & making simple yet effective educational videos is time consuming, if not necessarily costly. #NumericalMOOC was created on-the-fly, with little budget. But here’s my point: expensive, high-production-value videos are not necessary to achieve a quality learning experience.

The fixation with videos in MOOCs, online courses and blended learning is worrisome.

Roland Allen, Director of College Counseling at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in California and lead instructor of The Road to Selective College Admissions, discusses the lessons he’s learned from building a MOOC, and the value its brought to his teaching and students at St. Margaret’s.

This is the third in a series of articles that tackle common objections to and arguments against using massive open online courses (MOOCs) for training. Read the previous article: Face-to-Face learning had FAILED. All learners are different. They come from different backgrounds and have different levels of prior knowledge. They have different learning styles and preferences, different needs and different questions. For education to be effective and engaging, it needs to be adaptable for the need

"Advocates for the deaf on Thursday filed a federal class action against Harvard and M.I.T., saying both universities violate antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials.

“Much of Harvard’s online content is either not captioned or is inaccurately or unintelligibly captioned, making it inaccessible for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing,” the complaint said, echoing language used in the M.I.T. complaint. “Just as buildings without ramps bar people who use wheelchairs, online content without captions excludes individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing.”

This could be a landmark case. Harvard and MIT have no excuse other than inertia for ignoring well established accessibility requirements for their online content.

Unlike the majority of Universities, these schools have the financial power to do anything they want. They have the resources to hire accessibility experts and instructional designers to do the job. Close Captioning all video in an efficient and timely manner is a huge job. But it can be done.

This statement from Harvard is ingenuous. The rules are well known:

"Jeff Neal, a spokesman for Harvard, said that while he could not comment on the litigation, Harvard expects the United States Department of Justice to issue proposed rules later this year “to provide much-needed guidance in this area,” and that the university will follow whatever rules are adopted."

Harvard, MIT & EdX may end up causing an unexpected disruption in education: serious national attention on the rights of the disabled.

"In November 2011 I was taking one of the first MOOCs from Stanford. At that time, many new MOOCs were being announced and I started Class Central as a way to keep track of them and figure out what I should take next. The website gathers course listings through provider sites, social media, and tips from MOOC providers and users. The figures below are based on these data."

Technology trends in higher education are making on-campus college degrees feel like terrestrial radio stations. We know they’re on their way out of fashion. The question is just how soon.

A world without physical college campuses seems far-fetched, but there are three important reasons why we’re heading that direction. The first is financial disincentive.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board rose 40% at public and 28% at private colleges and universities between 2001 and 2012. Predictably, rising prices have also led to higher debt. The Wall Street Journal reported that the class of 2014 was the most indebted class in history. More than 70% of this year’s bachelor’s degree recipients are leaving school with student loans. Students with loans owe an average of $33,000. That’s more than double the inflation-adjusted average from 1993.

It has been suggested that, with care and dedication, you can assemble a Masters of Business Administration for free. Perhaps unsurprisingly for those in the know, the idea hasn’t caught on. When leading…

The MOOC philosophy has always come across as "Go big or go home." But some of the most interesting experiments occurring right now would better be described as "Divide and conquer." These undertakings — one an experiment at Harvard (MA) and the other a longer-term commitment at the University of Michigan — are allowing schools to try out new practices from a narrower perspective, while still impacting the broader workings of the institution.

The hype surrounding massive open online courses in recent years has led to questions about whether teaching — and learning — through a lecture broadcast to several students at the same time could democratize education, which is becoming an increasingly expensive investment in many parts of the world.

In developing countries, where youths often have even more barriers to schooling, this debate seems particularly relevant...

Three years ago, technology was going to transform higher education. What happened?

Over the course of a few months in early 2012, leading scientists from Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. started three companies to provide Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. The courses were free. Millions of students signed up. Pundits called it a revolution.

But today, enrollment in traditional colleges remains robust, and undergraduates are paying higher tuition and taking out larger loans than ever before. Universities do not seem poised to join travel agents and video stores on the ash heap of history — at least, not yet.

The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college students are paying for.

'Students should be at the centre of learning', declared Stephen Downes, 'because there is no other place they could possibly be.' Downes was speaking at the ELI 4th International Conference on e-Learning and Distance Education held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This was one of several sound bites that exemplified the theme of his speech, Design Elements in a Personal Learning Environment.

Although it's a fundamental principle of progressive education, keeping the student at the centre seems to be something that not many schools, colleges and universities are good at. Rows of seats still persist in the classrooms of many schools, and direct instruction still holds sway. Standardised tests are administered by schools who ignore the fact that all students are different, and bells continually punctuate the timetable, dividing the school day up into an unconnected parade of subjects, each delivered in content heavy lessons. One size never did fit everyone.

In his new book, Kevin Carey envisions a future in which online education programs solve two of colleges' biggest problems: costs and admissions.

A lot of parents start worrying about paying for college education soon after their child is born. After that, there's the stressful process of applying to colleges, and then, for those lucky enough to get admitted into a good college, there's college debt.

But author Kevin Carey argues that those problems might be overcome in the future with online higher education. Carey directs the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation. In his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, Carey envisions a future in which "the idea of 'admission' to college will become an anachronism, because the University of Everywhere will be open to everyone" and "educational resources that have been scarce and expensive for centuries will be abundant and free."

These The growing focus on skills-based education has prompted many education providers to design programs that target students and professionals searching for ways to improve their technical skills and advance their careers.

Programs like Udacity’s “nanodegrees,” can help students of all ages enhance their existing professional skills or explore career-related areas of interest.

Kim Flintoff's insight:

These programs begin to shift towards an "education on demand" model that reflects the changing nature of the labour market adapting agilely to rapidly fluctuating demands in skills and capabilities. Just in time learning applied to the individual seeking to meet the demands of industry. Ultimately they question the relevance and suitability of the "long form" degree structures that institutions still cling to.

There has been a great deal of discussion around the high drop-out (90% range) rates in MOOCs (and for the purposes of this article, I’ll concentrate on the xMOOCs, or those that are modeled on highly structured college courses). The first thing to note is that the sign-up process is so easy and devoid of commitment that “enrolling” might best be considered merely an indication of interest. However, even if you count the initial participants in other ways (those watching the first videos, stated intents to complete, etc.), there is no doubt that dropping out or disengagement is a significant phenomenon in most MOOCs

The use of video has been a major trend in MOOCs, especially when linked to universities and with teachers presenting actual courses. This challenge has led many teachers and learners to use it as an integral part, if not the main part, of a learning experience.

Video in MOOCs shouldn’t be used as a tool for already previewed course curriculums, but as an opportunity to reshape the course in itself, and eventually the way of teaching.

The University of Central Florida (UCF) has teamed with two partners to reboot a massive open online course (MOOC) for educators focused on blended learning in higher ed and K-12.

The university has partnered with Educause, a nonprofit focused on technology in higher education, and ed tech company Instructure to launch "BlendKit2015: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer." The course is intended to build on the success of BlendKit2014, a similar MOOC released last year that also covered blending learning and was Educause's first.

Abtract from the talk: "Sheila Webber will start by briefly outlining some general characteristics of MOOCs and her own experience with them. She will go on to identify types of MOOC and the implications for MOOC pedagogy. As part of this discussion she will note some findings from an investigation into the value of learning analytics for MOOC educators (undertaken by Naomi Colhoun at Sheffield University in summer 2014). In the final part of her presentation she will reflect on the various roles that have been, or could be, adopted by librarians."

Three years ago, several of us at Stanford launched the first massive open online courses, or MOOCs. We wanted to make the teaching of the world’s great universities accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. The company we founded, Coursera, recently passed a milestone: 10 million enrolled learners. That makes it a good time to reflect on what we’ve learned.

One early prediction about MOOCs was that they would undermine or even replace the traditional college education—an idea we at Coursera never endorsed (see “What Are MOOCs Good For?”).

- MOOC critics are concerned about low overall completion rates, but these rates are typically evaluated without accounting for student intentions. - This study, based on survey and log data from nine HarvardX courses, investigates how completion and attrition rates differ based on students' self-reported intentions about course participation. - The study found that, on average among survey respondents, 22 percent of students who intended to complete a course earned a certificate, compared with 6 percent of students who intended to browse a course. - Efforts to personalize MOOCs based on self-reported intentions should be conducted with care: many students who do not intend to complete a MOOC do so, and most who do intend to complete a MOOC are not successful.

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